Homepage & Category Usability

Exploring the customer’s product finding experience

After months of user testing and research, the most in-depth usability study on how to best design and structure your e-commerce homepage and category navigation is ready.

We’ve tested how users navigate and find products on 19 of the leading e-commerce sites and boiled the research findings down to 79 actionable guidelines that will improve the usability of your homepage and product categories.

Slide through the report

“Baymard helps us help our customers find the products they are looking for.”

Paul Irvine, Web Services Manager at Imagination Technologies

If they can’t find it, they can’t buy it

Product finding is key to any e-commerce business – after all, in order to buy a product your customers must be able to find the product first.

This original usability study focuses on how users navigate, find and select products on e-commerce sites. A group of users age 21-56 were recruited to test 19 of the leading e-commerce websites across 8 different verticals (mass merchants, apparel, electronics, jewelry, home decoration, toys & gifts, specialty equipment, and health & drugs). The tested pages and design elements include the homepage, category navigation, sub-categories, and product lists.

Throughout the test sessions, the subjects would repeatedly abandon sites because they were unable to find the products they were looking for. Indeed, the subjects encountered 900+ usability-related issues, and this is despite testing multi-million-dollar sites. All of these usability issues have been distilled into 79 concise usability guidelines that will help you design a user-friendly homepage and category structure so your customers can find the products they’re looking for.

Benchmark & Review Tool

Based on the findings from the research study we’ve benchmarked the homepage, menus, category structure, sub-category pages and product list, of the top 50 grossing e-commerce sites in the US. This provides you with a comprehensive benchmark database with 240 pages reviewed, 790 screenshots, and 1,800+ examples of the 79 usability guidelines.

The benchmark database is fully integrated with the report and comes bundled as part of the purchase, providing you with 50 case studies from the top e-commerce sites, acting as examples and inspiration on how to implement each of the 79 guidelines in the report.

Furthermore the benchmark database provides a tool for you to review your own (or your clients’) site and compare it directly against the top 50 e-commerce sites.

“All you need to know about navigation & categories for a successful e-commerce website.”

Experience Solutions (via Twitter)

Compared to other industry reports

eConsultancy
E-Commerce Best Practice

Baymard Institute
E-Commerce Homepage & Category Usability

Nielsen Norman Group
E-Commerce User Experience

Published:

2013

2013

2011

Pages:

99 pages

348 pages

2,140 pages

Guidelines:

-

79 guidelines

874 guidelines

Source:

Author’s thoughts

User testing

User testing

Benchmark:

No

Yes, 50 sites reviewed

No

Review tool:

No

Yes, interactive review tool

No

Price:

$695

$150

$996

Refund:

No

Yes, 14 days full refund

No

“We recommend it, especially if you plan on re-developing your website – and you want to make sure your web company is doing something near best practice.”

Richard Keeves, President of Western Australian Internet Association

Get your report now

Get your copy of this report instantly delivered as a PDF file for $150, and start improving your homepage and category design today at just $1.9 per actionable guideline.

Page types: Navigate the homepage and category designs by type of page

Report license

The report and Baymard Pro account are intended for internal use - for you and your team.

You and your team are allowed to both print and digitally distribute the report to employees within your own organization (i.e. within the same legal entity), as long as it is not accessible anyone outside it.

We trust our customers, so all reports we sell are unrestricted – this means that no DRM or other restrictive technologies are used.

Authors

Research is conducted and published by Baymard Institute, and written by its two founders:

Christian Holst – User experience engineer with a master's degree from the Technical University of Denmark. He has worked with designing user experiences in both the hearing aid and the credit card industry before co-founding Baymard Institute 2009.

Jamie Appleseed – Has a decade's worth of work experience designing and coding websites, with a focus on user experience. He has worked as lead developer on numerous web projects at web agency Spoiled Milk before co-founding Baymard Institute in 2009.

“I can not tell you how much help your benchmark studies have been for our company, e-commerce and UX teams. We have used and continue to use these reports for baseline benchmarks as we build test protocols or eye tracking scripts etc in lab.”References: Baymard Research

Richard Keeves, President of Western Australian Internet Association

“We recommend it, especially if you plan on re-developing your website – and you want to make sure your web company is doing something near best practice.”References: Homepage & Category Research

Cary Moody, Usability Researcher at Hallmark

“These reports are fabulous. The content is exactly what our team has been looking for, and so much more! Extremely helpful, thank you!”References: Baymard Research

Josh Shaw, Web Manager at Keurig Green Mountain

“I have found the M-Commerce and E-Commerce reports very useful, thank you!”References: Baymard Research

“It is immensely valuable having a thorough, independent study to help validate my work and in particular, help facilitate buy-off from stakeholders. Baymard has quickly become one of my most trusted resources for the UX/UI field.”References: Baymard Research